Apple’s Swift Will Dominate Cloud Services in 5 Years

We are at the beginning of a software development shift that will play out in the next 5 years. Perhaps sooner. The Swift programming language will be a dominant player in cloud services and here is why….

Swift will become the full stack language for millions of developers. When I say full stack, I don’t mean the current full stack,of web front-end and web backend, I mean the new dominate native mobile app front-end with cloud backend, written in Swift. The future of cloud service development will begin to migrate to Swift later in 2016 as Apple’s open source efforts will start to produce operationally superior cloud services for developers to put to work.

Most readers of this post will vehemently disagree. Currently, more than half of native mobile development will be written in Java because of the dominance of Android and its use of Java as the language for implementation on that platform. I’m going to take a stand with my prediction: Swift will be the language of choice on Android in 3 years. Swoot!Thus setting up my claim that Swift will dominate cloud services development in 5 years. Double Swoot! There is a lot going on here with my prediction. Let me provide some background.

First and foremost, native platform development is superior to any cross platform development tools and superior to HTML5, JavaScript and CSS implementations. It produces superior usability, superior performance and superior exploitation of the new hardware and software capabilities being added every year to both the Android and iOS platform.

Second, any software developer would rather develop using one language than two, three or four. Thus when Swift becomes available on the Android platform it will be adopted by those who are looking to increase developer productivity.

Third, most useful mobile apps are really mobile platforms and therefore they all have cloud based services. Again productivity matters. Productivity is quality wrapped in velocity. It will become necessary for development shops to concentrate the skills of their developers so that they can move across the full stack.

Fourth, as leaders see that Swift will become the leading cloud service development language, they will see the need to adopt Swift everywhere, including Android. If you’re thinking that I’m advocating some cross-platform, cross-stack framework nonsense, you are wrong. I believe that frameworks are key to representing different and competitive thoughts and practices in the software technology marketplace. They will remain specific to each platform. But the language we use to manipulate those frameworks will coalesce around Swift.

Here is the BIG prediction. We will see in 10 years a new “front-end” to the browser based internet. The mess that is front-end web development now, HTML, CSS, JavaScript will be replaced by something also driven by Swift and superior web front-end frameworks that will produce a vastly superior user experience for “browsers” users.

This will all come about because mobile apps will dominate the market for the foreseeable future and Swift is the language with the most momentum.